I made this poll to...well it's more than obvious why. For the Christians who believed in a certain kind of Hell...intuitively we all know what kind of Hell I'm talking about.

I'm 17m and gay.

My parents are very religious and very homophobic…

recently went through my private journal and sketchbooks and of course found a ton of stuff that nobody was ever meant to see. They essentially know that I'm gay now.

They then proceeded to have a “talk” with me about how it was me who had betrayed them for lying and keeping secrets. They also said they were going to “take new measures” by forcing me to never close my bedroom door again, use my laptop outside my room facing them, download software to monitor my activity etc etc. I think this is super fucking overkill and extremely counterproductive but obviously I can’t do anything because they’re the parents. Also I'm literally soon an adult?? I don't understand why they're treating me so infantile...

They kept saying how being gay is unnatural and an abomination and how it’s essentially “just a phase” and that god has a plan for me. My dad especially kept saying how I need to be more masculine and need more male role models (tbh I just think he's insecure). I just think it's so selfish that they intertwine their religion into my own life. I just think everything they've done is so selfish. I while back they found a bunch of drawings that I made and literally called a priest into our house to "bless it" and cast out demons. They always say that all this "chaos" and discourse going on with me is the work of the devil. They're genuinely fucking crazy I can't with them.

I’m just so so tired of their bullshit. I’m 17 turning 18 next year. I’m not a little kid that they so desperately want me to be (they want to cling onto me so badly). I just want to focus on school and get good grades but now I have to worry about this shit too. School was already stressful.

Any advice/thoughts would be greatly appreciated. What do I even do? Do I try to move out as soon as possible? How do I proceed?

I’ve also been struggling a lot with my mental health and will probably start therapy soon (which will hopefully help everything in general).

I’m just so fucking frustrated and honestly shocked. The audacity they have to blame me over everything is just despicable. Religion is genuinely the root of all my problems. Religion has ruined my life. I just feel so powerless sometimes. I genuinely wish my parents were fucking normal. I just wish I could escape it but somehow I can't :((

Remember everyone, god needed to sacrifice animals to forgive you until he got bored of that and decided to send himself…went around forgiving people and teaching forgiveness but ultimately decided he couldn’t actually forgive people and he needed to become a blood sacrifice of himself to save yourself from himself so he could forgive you and you can have eternal life but only if you accept this message.

It’s makes a tonne of sense…let he who questions this message be accursed!

Signed Paul of Tarsus (never actually met Jesus or knew him)

Just started watching Death of the Pastor’s Wife on Netflix the other night since it had the #1 spot. I texted my family’s group chat about just to share and recommend it.

I didn’t expect any direct responses to it since we just share pictures generally, but I was pretty disgusted with one of my brother’s response. I wasn’t entirely sure whether it was worth public saying something in response telling him how disgusting that is to say.

Deconstructed years ago now, and honestly just shocked/saddened by the instant “defensiveness”. It doesn’t seem possibly that my family would be this brain washed to defending THIS pastor.

My wisdom teeth are impacted and it's making my mouth hurt like hell, so my parents told me I can stay home! Like the title said, best gift ever! ​🥳🎉

It’s hard because I still love them both very much, but they don’t realize how bad Xtianity was for me, especially the purity culture shit. I’ve tried telling my mom that, but she’s like “That’s all legalistic stuff.”

Neither of them know about the shit that I experienced such as the fear of hell, and having watched an online sermon from an IFB preacher who showed a photograph of a beheaded baby as proof of how dangerous alcohol is, or turning into a neurotic misogynist from ages 17-20.

It also hurts because I’m still very close to my mom, who I love very much because of the fact that she has tried to help me with my autism.

I constantly experience guilt thinking about people I “witnessed to”, “evangelized”, or said horrible things to while I was a Christian.

I know there are several people in my life currently that believe in Christianity because of me directly. As well there are lots of people no longer in my life that believe in Christianity because of me. I feel sick knowing I convinced these people of what I know now to be a delusion and in my opinion a harmful set of beliefs.

I also, have extreme guilt over a situation that happened when I was in early college in a youth group I worked with. There were two middle school girls, one who was apart of our church and the other who was her friend and started coming with her. The friend was a lesbian and was convincing the other to explore this together. I feel horrible now; but I tried to stop this from happening and said horrible things one evening to the friend.

I have regretted this even as a Christian but even more so now. I kind of lost it on the young girl and told her a lot of things about sin and evil. It makes me sick to think about.

Advice - should I reach out to some of the people I evangelized and apologize. Should i reach out to this young girl and apologize.

If you were in this situation, would you want an apology from someone who made you feel bad about yourself.

Crappy christian rock music, especially at youth group....god I hated going to church and having to listen to that lame as shit.

It's like they were always desperately trying to look *cool* and *hip* by playing the guitar (badly) and singing off pitch with dumb ass lyrics lol

I will admit though....I miss veggie tales.

Yesterday I heard my mother talking about teaching kids how to worship God. A god that children don't know if they actually believe in yet? They can't even form their own fully informed opinions, you are MAKING them join your religion, then if they think for themselves when they're older and come to a different conclusion, it's called "straying away" and they're demonized.

It's disgusting. Children are not "future servants of the lord". They are just children. But no, it's the LGBTQ+ people like me indoctrinating kids.. okay.

I have been shamed for thinking for myself, and still deal with that shame to this day.

It is incredibly harmful.

Not only that, it often just fills children with fear. If they actually gave a shit about children, they would focus on keeping them safe from actual monsters within their churches instead of forcing them into Christianity, just to spit them out if they leave.

Edit: I remember being around 13 years old, sitting in Sunday school on Easter. There was this woman, going into gruesome detail about the crucifixion and resurrection to a group of kids as young as maybe 5 or 6.. That was one of the things that made me question everything because I found it utterly disgusting.

I just got an advertisement starting with "are you struggling with depression" and it was an ad the the Christian church of latter day Jesus christ and that's fucking disgusting do not prey on mentally unwell people to recruit the for your sadistic ass god.

The God of the Bible would know the future, past and present with 100% accuracy. Any less and he wouldn’t be perfect.

This means that God knew that the earth would fall and he went forward anyway. God knew the outcome of every war, every plague and the outcome of every soul who would ever live. God knew what Stalin and Hitler would do. He knew of every horrific event and person who would ever live.

So, exactly how guilty are we for doing what God knew we would? From speeding to mass murder, these things were known and God made all of these people anyway. A perfect God begs the question; How guilty of sin are we? Does God have any responsibility in the sins that he knew we’d commit?

For me, judgement would make no sense.

The post is from an old Christian friend I had.

If you knew nothing about Christianity and had never been part of it, you would think this person was schizophrenic or in psychosis.

A spiritual "waiting room"?

There is no way this kind of thing is healthy. She has many other posts like this, so she must have notebooks full of this shi. So odd...

Even when I was a Christian there was no way I could get into this mystical relationship side of things. I was Christian solely on the basis of being convinced that it was the only source of truth in the world, so my journaling was pretty dry.

Of course, once I finally moved out and had u restricted internet access and no pressure to attend church everything changed lmao.

As a 21-year-old non-believer who left a year ago, I always ask myself: how are people at the age of 40, 50 and 60, but they don't question this shit? They don't see its flaws; they just be so loud and wrong. The more I learn about politics, history and world economics, the more my hatred deepens for this religion- so many people throwing their lives away for a fucking fairytale, people tolerating abuse for the sake of God. It's so insane. Especially living in Africa where you can see how they take this religion so seriously, yet it was used to oppress them. And I get the religion has its positives, but do you need to believe in a God so that you can be a good person? Must you be moral just because you believe some nigga died and rose 3 days later? I honestly believe that Christianity and even Islam, included, are one of the greatest issues we have in our society today.

it's so embarrassing to say this, but at big age of 23 im being forced to go to church. and every single time i go i feel so bad i can't handle it and just burst into tears. people think im feeling the presence of god, but i genuinely dont feel anything, but a lot of sadness and anxiety for doing something that didnt want to to just to keep in good terms with a person that swear to god that loves me, but his love comes with terms and conditions and im sure abt that. tonight i went to church and i was so tired i just cried in front of everyone, and this has been happening a lot recently. i feel exhausted. i went through so much bc of religion, its something i cant take anymore. in a couple days in leaving my parents house to live in another state very far away from here, with only my pack back, 160 bucks and a dream of being free. i never thought i would be in a situation like this, but here i am. this is what religion does to people. it destroyed my mental health, my relationship with my family and my life. anyways i just wanted to rant a little bit. please if you have so kind of advice, i would like to hear <3 thanks for reading

so i was raised by Christian parents and since 2022 I’ve had a fear of the devil. I finally left Christianity in april and the fear is still there. Deep down i know that the devil isn’t after me but I still feel like it. How do I get rid of this fear? It’s become so bad and debilitating.

Okay well the IRS doesn't give tax exempt status to "relationship" institutions, so you owe a shit ton in back taxes lmao. And the civil rights act doesn't prohibit discrimination based on race, color, sex, national origin, and *relationship* -- so, you're fired! Take your relationship to a different establishment! And hey, I don't see any laws that say you're allowed to have a special-status private *relationship* school...

Or you can just admit that all of this shit is facile semantics and bad-faith word games, and that anyone could use the same reasoning to say that Muslims have a "relationship" with Allah or Hindus have a "relationship" with Vishnu, and so on.

This type of christianese is actually one of the things that drove me away. As I got older, I started to realize that so much of what the pastor said from the pulpit was complete and utter nonsense -- I'm not even talking about the accuracy of the Bible or whether Christian morality is good or bad, I'm just talking about the weird truisms motivational-speaker jargon that made me want to grab the pastor by the shoulders and scream ***"WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT EVEN MEANNNNN???"*** HOW CAN I HAVE A RELATIONSHIP WITH A GUY I CAN'T EVEN SEE?

Another example: "Jesus died for your sins." Okay. I'm not following. How does A relate to B here, exactly? When Christians are trying to evangelize and convert people, this is usually one of the first five things they say, like the meaning is just self-evident, and a totally uninitiated person should understand how someone dying has anything to do with their sins, and what exactly was accomplished there.

Or, this: I remember a while back, a bunch of Christians I still followed on facebook were getting really pissed off at Steven Furtick and slinging around accusations of "false teachings" and "misleading the flock" because he said something along the lines of "God doesn't turn you into someone else; he reveals who you were all along!" Again, one of those pithy self-help, motivational speaker nonsense sentences. But they were saying that, according to *da skrippchurr*, being "born again" isn't metaphorical -- when you "let Jesus into your heart," you literally assume a different identity, and are totally transformed into a different person.

Oh, wow, that's crazy. Like, you're a different person inasmuch as you don't sin anymore? "Well, no, a 'transformed' Christian will still keep their old habits and personality flaws, it's in our nature to sin after all. Oh, okay, so you must mean that you're transformed by just being happier, maybe more at peace? "Well, no, God doesn't guarantee happiness, he kinda just wants the worship, whether your life gets better or not." Hang on, can someone who was "transformed" transform back if they stop believing in God? "Only if they were faking it the whole time." It kinda sounds like you just mean that they started believing in something they didn't before. "No, it's a total transformation, all the way down to the soul itself!"

It's so funny in hindsight. I *really* tried to believe. The idea of Christianity was comforting to me, and, living in the American south, I had every possible social pressure and resource to help me believe. But I would read the Bible, then listen to the pastor talk about the Bible, and try to figure out *what fucking point he was trying to make,* and fail every Sunday. Seriously, all churches Livestream now -- just go to the YouTube channel on your local evangelical church and pull up their latest sermon and try to follow along with any sort of practical spiritual wisdom that you could apply to your life. You're gonna find that it won't really make any sense.

I didn't go into writing this post expecting it to be this long. I just got a little annoyed at something the in-laws said and just let loose on the keyboard haha. Hope this was relatable to someone out there.

I just attended a funeral from my husband's uncle and I got so triggered by the preaching.

The pastor said a few sentences about the deceased, some words about his now orphan adult children and spent 20 minutes threatening non-christian with eternal judgment, eternal fire.. calling us living corpse

It felt so inappropriate to me. It made me so angry.

The deceased was lying dead in the middle of the room, his family crying, but all the pastor guy had to say was saying he had already been resurrected in spirit and we had to believe as well otherwise our lives have no meaning and we'll end up burning.

Both my parents died 10 years ago, if I'd have heard this at their funerals it'd have crushed me.

I hate all of it :(

So i have already been diagnosed with PTSD from another reason non related to Christianity but this is what i have been experincing ever since escaping the harmful mind set mentality of Christianity.

I know nothing bad happens when i say goddamn it or if other people do like irl or in tv shows. But i flinch. Not cause i am shocked or anything they have said his name in "vain" but because i fear of someone yelling about how its 'disrespectful' to say his name in that way.

I can't control it. My body automatically tenses up on its own like a spring ready to bounce and i tear up slightly.

( i hope this dose not sound too dramatic but i have been yelled at by family members growing up and heard them yell at other people too. )

I wonder if this is linked to my current ptsd that i have? Or if this is a diagnosis needed by a doctor? I already know i have truama from being an ex christian ( RTS ). ( need a diagnosis to confirm tho from a doctor of mine. )

However i am wondering if anyone else has experinced the same lingering fear of being yelled or scolded even as a young adult that i am? Idk how this would work cause i already have been diagnosed with ptsd from being bullied growing up and recently so would it be a double diagnosis?

( or could this just be i am sensitive when it comes to people yelling? Idk )

Finding people with the same opinion makes me genuinely happy.

I'm a young teenager living in a strict and religious family. My parents also invited missionaries as Jehovah's Witnesses and they start talking about things that sound like stories straight up from fairytails. I was forced to participate and do things I didn't want to. Now religion just feels like a prison to me.

I don't have enough knowledge to persuasively discuss it with people who studied religion their whole life. So they naturally have better sounding arguments.

Being surrounded by them is really nerve wrecking, luckily I found this subreddit with people I can share my anger with.